mutabilities

Updated: May 4, 2025

It is amusing to think how soon the "mutabilities of fashion" did for a time supersede many of his designs. A selection of designs from his book is given, and it will be useful to compare them with those of other contemporary makers.

Frederick Litchfield - Illustrated History of Furniture: From the Earliest to the Present Time

"But will you explain what you mean, epitome that you are of all the contradictions and mutabilities ascribed to women from the beginning! 'Certainly', he says, and knows no more than I. She begs grace for an hour, and returns with a fresh store of evasions, to insult the man she has injured.

George Meredith - The Egoist

There is no end, there never will be an end, of the lamentations which ascend from earth and the rebellious heart of her children, upon this huge opprobrium of human pride the everlasting mutabilities of all which man can grasp by his power or by his aspirations, the fragility of all which he inherits, and the hollowness visible amid the very raptures of enjoyment to every eye which looks for a moment underneath the draperies of the shadowy present, the hollowness, the blank treachery of hollowness, upon which all the pomps and vanities of life ultimately repose.

Thomas De Quincey - Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers — Volume 1

The mutabilities of human life had seemed to him to be appointed to whites to be their privilege and their discipline; while he doubted not that the eternal command to blacks was to bear and forbear.

Harriet Martineau - The Hour and the Man, An Historical Romance

There is no end, there never will be an end, of the lamentations which ascend from earth and the rebellious heart of her children, upon this huge opprobrium of human pride the everlasting mutabilities of all which man can grasp by his power or by his aspirations, the fragility of all which he inherits, and the hollowness visible amid the very raptures of enjoyment to every eye which looks for a moment underneath the draperies of the shadowy present, the hollowness, the blank treachery of hollowness, upon which all the pomps and vanities of life ultimately repose.

Thomas De Quincey - Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers

Such, O reader! was the aspect and the occupation of the venerable man whom we have long since taught thee to admire; such, alas for the mutabilities of earth! was A new chapter only can contain the name. Caliban. Hast thou not dropped from heaven? Tempest.

Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton - Paul Clifford — Complete